Sandi Toksvig on the draw of riddles

I love a good prattle, but I get sidetracked by a good riddle – like
disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle

6:30AM GMT 04 Mar 2012

It was today in 1918 that quite a large US Navy ship, the USS Cyclops, vanished in the so-called “Bermuda Triangle” without a trace of either the vessel or her 306 crew and passengers. It’s the sort of sobering story which puts any travel hiccup into perspective. I got stuck in one of the new passport control machines at Heathrow Terminal 1 the other day but it wasn’t for long. No one knows what happened in the “triangle” and some people are disinclined to inquire. When five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers disappeared in the same area in 1945, the plane that went to look for them also vanished. It’s a riddle and it reminded me of Ambrose Bierce.

Bierce did what I do – he wrote a regular newspaper column but he did it in San Francisco in the late 19th century when the traffic was slower and the weather better. He called his column “Prattle”, a marvellous word deriving from “prate” meaning to talk foolishly or tediously about something. Bierce was also a brilliant short story writer (If you haven’t read his tale entitled “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” please do. It is available free on the internet and is genius) and I wonder if he disdained some of his more disposable weekly writing?

I love prattling each week, but I know that I am easily flattered away to something more “literary”. Indeed, so flattered that the other week, I went swimming outdoors in temperatures of -4C. I was in Iceland (the very lovely country not the shop with the frozen food) where I had been happily lured to present a women’s literary prize.

It was a curious event where I congratulated writers whose winning efforts I had been unable to read. Sadly very little Icelandic work is translated into English which is a shame for it is a place with a thriving writing scene. Iceland has a population the size of Croydon. Despite this it has most Nobel Prize winners for literature per capita in the world. Of course this still means they only have one, Halldór Laxness, because, as I said, the population is the size of Croydon.

My hosts took me out past Laxness’s house on the outskirts of Reykjavik and out into the frozen rift valley of Pingvellir. The meeting of the tectonic plates of Eurasia and North America runs like a fissure under the whole island and the rift valley has all the appearance of having been pushed up from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It was here in 930AD that the first parliament in the world began to meet and continued to do so annually until 1798. This treeless place is an astonishing site both historically and geologically.

We stood on the Lögberg, the Law Rock, where once the laws of the land were proclaimed out loud, and talked about the Íslendingasögur, the great medieval sagas of the 13th and 14th centuries. I suppose the British equivalent would be taking a day trip to Canterbury and chatting about Chaucer. The sagas are not exactly history, yet they explain a great deal about the early settlers and there seems to be an enviable connection between the writers of today and those early scribes.

I feel connected myself to writers who have gone before me. The Icelanders are fond of a swim in thermally heated waters even in the depths of winter and I was persuaded in. I can’t say I enjoyed it myself. I could not relax in the warm pool for thinking about the wobbly walk back through the snow in my swimsuit. Funnily enough it was Ambrose Bierce I thought about.

He once wrote about the curious bathing habits of the people of Zanzibar. It seemed that the late 19th-century American consul to Zanzibar had a house on the beach. He spent much of his time complaining about the local people who used the nearby strip of water to bathe in. One day a woman arrived and took off all her clothes to begin washing. Incensed, the consul got his gun and fired some birdshot into the woman’s derrière. Unfortunately for American/Zanzibari entente cordiale, she turned out be the Sultan’s wife.

How odd to think of Ambrose Bierce during an Arctic swim and how odd to think of him today. In 1913 he went to Mexico to witness the revolution there and vanished without trace. One of the most famous disappearances in American literary history. Odd, isn’t it?